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[BBC correspondent] Mariko Oi enters the world of konkatsu, the Japanese term for spouse-hunting. We attend singles events and elaborate speed dating parties in bars, bowling alleys and even Buddhist Temples. In the last few years, Japan’s government has joined this match making party. President Shinzo Abe’s administration has pumped billions of Japanese yen into konkatsu activities sponsored by local municipalities. Mariko will also hear striking evidence that Japanese people are losing interest in our conventional idea of relationships.

The term herbivore man was coined a decade ago to describe men who do not aggressively pursue relationships. But it has since come to denote men without interest in sex too. At the same time, the phrase ‘Carnivore woman’ emerged, depicting a career-focused woman rejecting the life of a housewife. Are weaker men and stronger women outgrowing each other?

Professor Masahiro Yamada of Chuo University describes how increasing numbers of Japanese young people are forgoing real life partners for what he calls virtual relationships.

Mariko will meet women who pay for male attention in Tokyo’s host bars and visits a specially designed apartment that aims to boost the flagging libido of Japan’s singles.

Honestly, rule of thumb to working in Japan seems to be...you must be a specialist in a field and you must be good (for science it seemed to be minimum PhD requirement. Not sure about now. Arts like music will of course be way harder) otherwise you'll just end up no where. General labour jobs is obviously a no go (and pointless also...why would you spend so much to go to another country just to do a slave job which even locals find terrible)

From friends who have worked in Japan there are a fair of guest workers there, I guess from countries where even a general labouring job is a step up from life in their home country. Brazil & The Philippines come to mind.

When I travel to Asia, I’m fairly often met at the airport by someone holding a sign reading “Mr. Paul.” Why? In much of Asia, names are given family first, personal second — at home, the prime minister of Japan is referred to as Abe Shinzo. And the mistake is completely forgivable when it’s made by a taxi driver picking up a professor.

It’s not so forgivable, however, if the president of the United States makes the same mistake when welcoming the leader of one of our most important economic and security partners. But there it was: Donald Trump referring to Mr. Abe as, yes, Prime Minister Shinzo.

Mr. Abe did not, as far as we know, respond by calling his host President Donald.

The New York Times has the biggest newsroom at 620 Eighth Avenue. But not the only one.

Most Times employees would be surprised to learn that on the 18th floor of our headquarters is another newsroom that looks like the rest of our space. It’s furnished identically. The journalists maintain their desks with equal fastidiousness. The resemblance ends there.

This is the New York bureau of The Asahi Shimbun, a venerable and influential Japanese newspaper and website. Four correspondents, three assistant reporters and an office manager are stationed here. They cover, for their readers who are primarily back in Japan, American society, politics, business, culture, immigration policy, terrorist incidents and mass shootings, supplementing the work of their colleagues in Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

It sounds like a very contemporary kind of arrangement: two large international media companies sharing quarters.

In fact, it goes back 89 years.

World War II put a strain on this relationship, of course. Shimbun staff members were imprisoned in the US, and Times staffers met the same fate in Japan.

Hundreds of toxic wild boars have been roaming across northern Japan, where the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant six years ago forced thousands of residents to desert their homes, pets and livestock. Some animals, like cattle, were left to rot in their pens.

As Japan prepares to lift some evacuation orders on four towns within the more than 12-mile exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant later this month, officials are struggling to clear out the contaminated boars.

Wild boar meat is a delicacy in northern Japan, but animals slaughtered since the disaster are too contaminated to eat. According to tests conducted by the Japanese government, some of the boars have shown levels of radioactive element cesium-137 that are 300 times higher than safety standards.

Officials have also expressed concern that returning residents may be attacked by the animals, some of which have settled comfortably in abandoned homes and have reportedly lost their shyness to humans.

Today's bit of Japanese culture concerns former Boston Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez who just signed with the Kochi Island Fighting Dogs. Manny's contract includes not only a salary, but this array of special goodies:

A Mercedes car and a driver

Optional practices

His own hotel suite during road trips

and the most important item,

Unlimited sushi all season long

Guess he developed a taste for sushi while growing up in the Dominican Republic!

Thought about replying to the two earlier posts included in this reply but at this point I'm not sure if it would help the issue you raised with the quote from the third message. Would writing "You're doing fine on your own" make it better?

One iconic feature of anime is its preoccupation with power lines and power poles. In my experience this goes back to Evangelion with its lingering shots of poles and wires. As the Tokyo Olympics looms, however, those poles may be a thing of the past. The Japanese government intends to put all the overhead cables in Tokyo underground by 2020 and is forcing the utilities like TEPCO, NTT, and DoCoMo to pony up a share of the costs.

Only seven percent of Tokyo's power lines are underground with an even smaller share in Osaka. For Jakarta and Seoul the figure is 35-40 percent; in London and Paris, 100 percent.

When I'd see these shots of power poles in anime, I thought the rapid postwar development of Japan after World War II was one likely reason. It was faster and cheaper to put up poles and wires if you're trying to expand utility services as quickly as possible. The video in the Bloomberg article below makes that same point.

The governor of Tokyo, Koike Yuriko, has been a particularly outspoken critic of the Japanese power grid, less for its unsightly appearance and more for the threat it poses should a major earthquake hit her city.

One iconic feature of anime is its preoccupation with power lines and power poles. In my experience this goes back to Evangelion with its lingering shots of poles and wires. As the Tokyo Olympics looms, however, those poles may be a thing of the past. The Japanese government intends to put all the overhead cables in Tokyo underground by 2020 and is forcing the utilities like TEPCO, NTT, and DoCoMo to pony up a share of the costs.

Only seven percent of Tokyo's power lines are underground with an even smaller share in Osaka. For Jakarta and Seoul the figure is 35-40 percent; in London and Paris, 100 percent.

When I'd see these shots of power poles in anime, I thought the rapid postwar development of Japan after World War II was one likely reason. It was faster and cheaper to put up poles and wires if you're trying to expand utility services as quickly as possible. The video in the Bloomberg article below makes that same point.

The governor of Tokyo, Koike Yuriko, has been a particularly outspoken critic of the Japanese power grid, less for its unsightly appearance and more for the threat it poses should a major earthquake hit her city.

That is terrible....those power lines are iconic not just of Japanese towns but East Asian ones everywhere. Just like neon bill boards and old electric trains. They have been vanishing everywhere and now Japan too...? if it's not a safety threat, they should stay IMO (like in smaller towns and such with less people)

That is terrible....those power lines are iconic not just of Japanese towns but East Asian ones everywhere. Just like neon bill boards and old electric trains. They have been vanishing everywhere and now Japan too...? if it's not a safety threat, they should stay IMO (like in smaller towns and such with less people)

Except that they are a safety threat in the case of an earthquake for example. If the ground shakes and those wires break and hit puddles of water for example they can become dangerous to anyone who is unfortunate to touch it.

That's just an example that came to mind, I'm sure there are other reasons.

That is terrible....those power lines are iconic not just of Japanese towns but East Asian ones everywhere. Just like neon bill boards and old electric trains. They have been vanishing everywhere and now Japan too...? if it's not a safety threat, they should stay IMO (like in smaller towns and such with less people)

Gotta modernize your infrastructures, and it was long overdue. I was thinking that the burying process of the power grid would have been done with further progress by now. Besides, I also think that wired power lines are extremely dangerous when they stand broken in the aftermath to an eathrquake or a typhoon.

For the past decade, a group of sand sculpture artists gather [in Tottori] every year for two weeks at the world’s only indoor sand museum to mount an exhibit of improbably intricate tableaus, all crafted from about 3,000 tons of sand.

This year, 19 artists from countries including Canada, China, Italy, the Netherlands and Russia traveled to Tottori to sculpt scenes on the theme of the United States. Previous themes have included Africa, Russia and South America.

Working nine hours a day, the artists — five of whom are from the United States — built, among other things, Mount Rushmore, the New York skyline (yes, Trump Tower makes an appearance), oversize busts of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, scenes from the gold rush and the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Curiously, with such an international crew, [museum director] Chaen has never invited a Japanese artist to sculpt in Tottori.

“I am not intentionally excluding Japanese artists,” he said. “But at this moment I don’t think any Japanese artists have risen to the top level yet.”

Tottori doesn't have many inhabitants, but it has sand, lots and lots of sand. It sits near a national park replete with sand dunes. However the artists can't use any of that sand which is protected by its park status. Instead Tottori has preserved tons of sand excavated during a road-building project about a decade ago. They reuse the same sand every year, so these works of art are obliterated after an eight-month display.

“One attraction of the sand sculptures is their frailty,” said Yoshihiko Fukazawa, the mayor of the city of Tottori, the capital of the prefecture. “All the forms will eventually disappear or degrade or collapse.” Treasuring that impermanence, he said, is “a Japanese virtue.”

"Much has been made of Japan’s recent turn away from pacifism and growing military
muscle, but Tokyo is also extending its global reach in more subtle ways. Japan is
especially serious about increasing its soft power, the ability to win over global partners
with cultural and diplomatic affinity rather than coercion and sheer heft.

Tokyo has long busied itself building a national “brand”, an image that combines the
supposed uniqueness of Japanese language, cuisine, and traditional hospitality with its
postwar pacifism and reputation for technological prowess. The latest iteration of this
project is the Cool Japan initiative, which capitalises on the international popularity of
manga and anime to project the Japanese brand around the world.

But while this might all sound like very 21st-century stuff, the idea of packaging national
culture into a political brand is a familiar one, and Japan has been doing it for decades –
albeit in very different ways."

thanks for the great article. I'm fond of Japan and its culture. I think the best way to learn more about foreign culture is to live for a while in this country. I'm going to Japan this summer, I've already booked tickets at https://lowcostclub.ca/ to Tokyo. Want to spend two weeks there. I heard that Japanese people are friendly, hope I'll find new friends there.

High school dating? No big deal in many parts of the world — but in Japan, it means something quite different.

Here, “high school dating” matches girls in uniforms with men in their 40s and 50s and beyond. And it means money changing hands.

Sometimes this involves a walk around the block or a drink in a bar. More often, it involves sex — child prostitution by another name.

There are various levels of high school dating, starting with cafes staffed by underage girls and peep shows where high school girls sit behind a one-way mirror in their school uniforms, posing according to customers’ requests.

There is also “tour guiding,” when girls go for a walk with men, a walk that often ends with some kind of sexual service, and the straightforward “compensated dating” — being paid for sex.